RipTen Videogame Blog » Gavin Bard

Blizzard Challenges Valve’s Trademark of DotA, Thunderdome Imminent

Gavin Bard — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:00:41 +0000

Okay, so let’s try to get this straight. A million years ago in gaming years, Blizzard made Warcraft III. People really liked Warcraft III. Included with the game was a World Editor that people used to create numerous mods which helped make the community quite strong. Arguably the most popular of these mods was Defense of the Ancients. Fast forward to the hear and now. With the internet suddenly being Zerg rushed by DotA-like games, Valve hires one of the people who were heavily involved in the development of the mod, the eloquently titled IceFrog. They decide this game will be called DotA 2. Excuse me, they decide this game will be called Dota 2. That is actually pretty important. Valve attempts to register the name in the wonderful, straightforward, and totally never arbitrary or confusing world of American copyright law, but is challenged by Blizzard through a Notice of Opposition.

What does this all mean?

Two huge companies are arguing over who has the rights to the name of a mod that neither of them actually developed. There are all kinds of weird legal things that this is going to touch on. Blizzard is making the argument that they own a piece of the pie because the mod was originally created on Warcraft III, and to create it you had to click “yes” on their EULA which probably said all kinds of other things too that nobody bread. Valve is saying that they aren’t actually calling it Defense of the Ancients and are calling it Dota because the name has come to represent the genre. Isn’t Blizzard essentially doing the same exact thing by releasing Blizzard DOTA? I don’t actually see how Blizzard can own the name of a fan created mod that, at this point, has nothing to do with them. Obviously if Dota 2 was being made on the Warcraft III engine, they would have a leg to stand on- but as a standalone game that isn’t using any of Blizzards technical assets it just doesn’t seem to make much sense. The one thing we can be sure of is that, somehow, both sides will find a way to screw consumers. It is the one constant we have in this world when two huge companies start to legally bicker at each other.

It’ll be an interesting few months watching both sides clash though. I hope they meet in an alley while snapping their fingers rhythmically. It’ll probably be way more fun than playing any of the games in this genre, I don’t even know why anybody is worried about which of them is named what since they all play exactly the same.

That last sentence is going to get me yelled at in the comments, isn’t it? Whatever. I hate dubstep too.

[Via: NeoGAF, Boring Legal Thing]

RipTen Retrograde: Hydlide (NES, 1989)

Gavin Bard — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:30:49 +0000

I figured with the recent string of great RPGs being released over the last few months, it was time for me to bring you all back down to earth and give you a reminder that it isn’t always sugar and honey. Kingdoms of Amalur may be the first RPG from Curt Schilling, but Hydlide was one of the first RPGs to ever be released on the consoles in Japan way back in 1984. It originally came out on the NEC PC-6000 and later on the PC-88 before eventually meandering its way over to America on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989.

The biggest problem with Hydlide, other than all of its huge glaring flaws I mean, is that when it was finally released in America it was already incredibly dated. Even if it was’t lacking of any real value, America had already suckled at the Legend of Zelda’s supple teats. After seeing what the genre done right was like, there was no chance America would be accepting of the genre done horribly wrong. USA! USA!

Hydlide is a story of a dragon named something who kidnaps a princess named somebody in order to something. Of course, by kidnap I mean he breathes fire at her and turns her into a couple fairies.

Yeah, I don’t really know how that works either. While Hydlide is pretty notorious over here for being the one of the worst things to ever happen to humanity ever, it should also be pointed out that this garnered a huge following in Japan. Sequels were even made on the MSX, Genesis, and Saturn. None of them were very good either. Go figure.

Represented here are the lion’s share of sprites present in this game. That is pretty much all you get to look at for the whole thing. It was aesthetically dated for 1989 on the NES, which is sort of a feat in itself.

Joss Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Hold B and Ram Yourself Into Enemies Uselessly Until Hopefully They Die. ”

Anybody want an overused Anchorman reference in lieu of anything unique or funny to say? I could type one here if you wanted. No? Alright. Good choice.

Honestly though, as bad as this is, it still isn’t as awful as having to watch Diary of the Dead.

Sir Jim- High Time’s Stupid Useless Knight of the Year.

He who controls the spice, controls the universe!!!

It was nice of Sharon Carter to help Sir Jim out on his inept journey.

You know how everybody points out that there was no way you would have ever figured out on your own to burn that ONE bush in that ONE spot in Legend of Zelda without outside help? Every single thing you have to do in Hydlide is like that. Every. Single. Thing. Compound that with the least intuitive controls and password system to ever be crapped into gray plastic and you have a perfect recipe for frustration pie.

When you destroy this gravestone, it makes it so you can kill the dragon outside of the castle. A completely logical connection that everybody would easily make without dying a dozen times before accidentally finding it out.

The most climatic battle since the Battle of the Ice! Watch out Hermann of Dorpat! Sir JIM is out for blood.

The oppressive heat of his armor and the pain of his own wounds drove Sir Jim to one knee. “My princess,” he forces out, “I have come to save you.”

“Delightful,” exclaims the three fairies, who are actually the Princess for some odd reason, in unison. “For your bravery in rescuing us, we will reward you with the highest honor- by letting you watch a lesbian fairy orgy.”

Sir Jim looked on with his mouth agape, it was a few minutes before he figured out the way to word his next statement, “Logistically speaking, does that count as incest for you, or masturbation?”

What does one say about Hydlide that hasn’t already been said? From its barely working combat system, to its copyright infringing Indiana Jones overworld theme, to its ugly-even-in-1984 graphics, Hydlide rightfully deserves its place in bad gaming history. I really don’t get how this was so well received in Japan. I understand that it was one of the first actual console RPGs over there, but even when giving it the benefit of the doubt for being groundbreaking in a very loose way it still isn’t good. I don’t care if it came out first, the only way Hydlide could be considered groundbreaking is because you would need a bunch of shovels to bury every copy of the game in the desert.

1 (RIP) to 4 are varying degrees of a bad game. A 1 (RIP) being a game you would actually pay money to not play, and a 4 is something that just barely fails to be mediocre.

Hydlide was developed and published by T&E Soft Corporation, who pretty much only makes golf games now for the record- just saying, for a whole bunch of system before it came to the NES in 1989. This copy was provided to us by yard sales everywhere.

Do you have a game you’d like to see featured in this ~~stupid idea~~ creative and original work of game journalism art? Have you played Hydlide and want to drop your two cents in? Did you actually like this game and want to yell at me because you are clearly insane? If so, let me or RipTen know on Twitter, or in the comments on this very site!

Next Time on the Retrograde: B.O.B.

A Brief History of First Impressions

Gavin Bard — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:30:48 +0000

Depending on who you ask, first impressions can either be incredibly important or just very important. There really aren’t a lot of people who will tell you a first impression doesn’t matter. For example, once a long time ago I went to send a resume and portfolio to a site I wanted to work for. I copy and pasted the website where my portfolio was located and sent it to the editor post haste. Only after I irrevocably hit send did I realize that the link I included was not to my portfolio, but instead was a link to award winning transsexual porn star Bailey Jay’s website.

Two days later I had the job- and that is the story of how I got hired by RipTen.

So, clearly, first impressions matter in the real world to real people, but do they matter to gamers? The almost ethereal and mystical creatures that we are? I’m sure this is something that 38 Studios is thinking about right now. With the first game that 38 Studios has had its hands in, Kingdoms of Amalur, less than 24 hours away, 38 Studios is probably crossing their fingers that the gaming public considers their debut a good one. Big Huge Games, the other half involved in Amalur’s development, already has made their first impression with the critically acclaimed semi-historical real-time-strategy Rise of Nations.

It is interesting to look back on companies in our little hobby and see what kind of first impression they made, especially since many of them were pretty inauspicious. At least I hope it is interesting, because I spent like two hours Googling this stuff when I should have been thinking of what I was going to write about today and was kind of hoping to make some lemonade out of my internet ADD. I hope my editor doesn’t read that last part. [Ed. - Sigh.]

Square – The Death Trap
In 1984, while Ronald Reagan was saving punk rock by doing all kinds of dreadful things in America, Japan saw the seeds sown that would eventually grow into one of most iconic game companies of all time. Before Square was their own independently operated company, they were the software division of Denyūsha Electric Company. I couldn’t find any confirmation if “Fargo North, Decoder” was involved in Death Trap’s production though.

The Death Trap was an interactive fiction game with adventure game mechanics for the PC-88. It involved the player inputting some simple commands and making some decisions in order to navigate the plot. A plot that, since it was the 80s, was of course related to the cold war.

The game sold so well that less than a year later, Square developed their a direct sequel to it named Will: The Death Trap II. Even in those early days, Square loved themselves some sequels. While Will didn’t sell as much as the original, it was still a commercial success. By the time Square developed their third game, the awesomely titled Cruise Chaser Blassty, they had become their own company. Now, you may not know this, but Square went on to develop a couple other games since then. You may have even heard of a couple of them!

Enix & Chunsoft – Door Door
Enix- the current ying to Square’s, well, other ying I guess- was established as a publisher of home computer games in 1982. They then employed the rather unusual, and eventually quite successful, tactic of holding design contests where they offered a whopping million yen for people who submitted the winning games. Enix used these contests to find talented developers and began to hire them for projects, many of which included polishing the chosen winners from those very same contests.

The very first winner, and thus the first game officially published by Enix, was a game called Door Door by Koichi Nakumura. Originally released on the PC-88 but eventually given a Famicom port, Door Door is a puzzle game with heavy reliance on platforming and strategy. You control a small creature in a baseball hat named Chun and try to keep him from being killed by a bunch of colorful aliens. In order to keep that from happening, you need to trap them by opening doors and then closing them after the aliens enter them. This is much more difficult than it sounds those, as doors can only be used once and then they are locked for good. Door Door is the literal definition of “Japan hard.” It was also wildly popular.

While Door Door was quite successful, a few short years later Nakumura would go on to found Chunsoft and, with another winner of Enix’s design contests by the name of Yuji Horii. would create a little game by the name of Dragon Quest. I’m pretty sure Japan has built statues in their honor because of that.

Capcom – Vulgus
Vulgus, aka Deadpool’s favorite Capcom game, was released for the arcades in 1984. Like a large amount of Capcom’s early titles, it is a vertical scrolling shooter. Comparatively to later games in the genre, it is very basic. There are no power ups, only a few levels, and even the difficulty isn’t as challenging as you would expect from a game like this. Eventually, Capcom would branch away from shooters and find their arcade success in other genres, namely fighting. Also I guess Mega Man is pretty cool too.

Of all the debut games here, this one might be the one the average gamer is most likely to have played. Vulgus has been included in numerous Capcom collections on everything from the Saturn to the PSP, as well as being name dropped in at least two Vs. Capcom games that I can think of. No idea if Deadpool will ever convince them to make that sequel though.

BioWare – Shattered Steel
Before BioWare found their fame in the wild world of RPGs, they started with Shattered Steel in 1996. Shattered Steel had far more in common with Mechwarrior than it did D&D, but it did still show the sparks of BioWare’s attention to detail within their games. Then again, you can’t really do a mech simulator game without having a pretty intricate attention to detail. They don’t make controllers with eight hundred buttons for those games just to be ironic, after all.

Shattered Steel wasn’t enormously popular or anything, but it sold well enough and thanks to its unique deformable terrain and zone based damage mechanics- two things that weren’t very common in 1996- it developed a cult following. BioWare would begin talking about a sequel to the game, but not before they created Baldur’s Gate, which would end up setting them down the path to becoming the developer we know and love them as today. I wonder how different the gaming landscape would have been if Shattered Steel would have been an immense hit? Probably a lot more Battletech games everywhere.

Actually, that doesn’t sound too bad.

UbiSoft – Zombi
In 1986 the gaming world wasn’t as super-saturated by zombie games as it is today. It also wasn’t as saturated by UbiSoft, as they had just popped into existence in the realm of wine and fine cheeses that we refer to as France. Those two Venn circles met and gave birth to Ubi’s first game, a piece of Romero worship by the name of Zombi for the Amstrad CPC. A brief piece of horror history for you- Zombi was the Italian name of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. The late great Lucio Fulci would direct Zombi 2 in 1979, although it really wasn’t a sequel at all. I’d have greatly preferred a Zombi 2 game, mostly for a “press A to pierce a girls eyeball with a wood splinter” scene.

This particular Zombi shares a lot in common with Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. By a lot, I mean literally everything. It is a first person adventure game that plays much like a dungeon craw and takes place in a mall. Most of its major plot points are directly related to things that happened in Dawn of the Dead. It isn’t a bad game, but it is certainly majorly forgettable- and with the hundreds of games Ubi has published or developed since, it is no wonder.

Bethesda – Gridiron!
So, what kind of game do you think Bethesda opened up with? Did you say an American football game? No? Well you should have, because that is the right answer. Bethesda created the first physics based sports game and released it on the Amiga. It wasn’t pretty, even by 1986 standards. The players were crudely represented by dots and there wasn’t much else to the game, but it wasn’t supposed to look like a game of football- it was supposed to play like one. For the first time, the players had mass and speed. Dots would bounce off each other and break tackles in as realistic a way as possible in ’86.

EA would eventually notice and sign Bethesda on to create a follow up to the game. This partnership was not a friendly one though, as Gridiron! 2 Electric Boogaloo was never meant to see the shelves at your local Babbages. Bethesda suspected EA only wanted to get their hands on the physics in order to use them for their own upcoming Madden-related football game and would sue EA for $7 million. It seems that sometimes things never change.

Although I don’t think Gridiron! needed any patches, so maybe things do change sometimes.

Violent Video Game Tax? Another Great Idea From the Political Establishment!

Gavin Bard — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 01:00:48 +0000

In an absolutely brilliant move, Rep. William Fourkiller (will.fourkiller@okhouse.gov) of Oklahoma has introduced a bill that will not only raise taxes on the very wealthy but also eliminate many of the more egregious tax loopholes that they take advantage of in order to dodge paying any actually significant percentage of their income in taxes. This bill doesn’t just stop there though. It also raises the capital gains tax back to what it was before Ronald Reagan let his totally unbiased group of corporatist advisers start to muck around with the tax code, which enabled their trickle down economics that never, ever, ever worked. It also removes subsidies for the oil and natural gas industry and instead states that the income from taxing those industries will be moved to create more green energy, as the green energy sector is one of the few industries creating jobs. Perhaps the best part of this bill though, is the codification of the “Robin Hood tax.” The Robin Hood tax is a small tax, like literally a percent of a percent, that is placed on large scale financial transactions. This can make billions because of the sheer amount of volatile trading going on in this ridiculously unequal economic system we currently exist in. Thankfully though, the brave William Fourkiller (2300 N. Lincoln Blvd. Room 510B, Oklahoma City, OK 73105) has stepped up to the plate and said “no more.” No more will they make the difference up on the back of regular, middle class Americans. No longer will corporate owned politicians wage a class war against everyone that doesn’t have nine zeroes in their bank account. This bill will surely be a model other states can use to quickly fill their ever depleting coffers.

Haha, I’m just kidding. He decided it makes more sense to tax violent video games instead- or, I should say, “violent” with as many ironic quotation marks around it as I can fit. This is an American politician we are talking about here. Since taxing the super wealthy and making sure huge multinational corporations who use the country’s resources actually pay the correct amount of taxes for the profit they’ve made is a total no-no in a plutarchy, William Fourkiller (405-557-7394)- who I would hazard has never actually played a video game in his life and still somehow represents thousands of people who do- has decided to make up the money on the backs of a consumer group that doesn’t throw as much of their cash into the insatiable maw of the political machine. It is exactly like how we can’t remove the tax breaks multi-millionaires get to use fossil fuel burning private jets because that might upset those poor baby “job creators” that don’t actually create jobs, they can constantly raise things like toll and public transportation fares. It is a strategy that has existed since the very first group of people with shiny stones decided they could hoard more of their shiny stones if they became the ruling class- move the burden onto those who can’t do anything about it because they aren’t the ones yanking the strings in this almost comically broken system. Although it is an election year, so maybe it isn’t just another out of touch politician taking a piss on those filthy proles and he is looking for a political victory with all those poorly informed pro-censorship fundamentalist types that parrot how dangerously violent everything is without having the actual slightest clue what they are talking about. I mean, with all those hundreds-of-none scientific studies that exist saying violent video games make violent kids, I can understand why they would want to single them out to make up their massive budget shortfall in as inefficient a way as possible.

The most telling thing about this is that all teen rated games would be included in the violent category. I’m not even going to bother listing the ridiculous titles that would be considered subject to the “I’m an Ignorant Blue Dog” violent video game tax (that might not be what they are calling it) because, as a gamer, I’m sure you ran a bunch through your head while facepalming with the fury of a thousand suns. This just shows that William Fourkiller really doesn’t understand anything about the gaming industry, let alone the gaming culture it has spawned. Yet he gets to legislate it, go figure. Our representational democracy sure does rule doesn’t it? Why with all the accurate and fair representation we all get.

Make sure you let ol’ Willy know how much we all appreciate his well informed, intelligent, useful bill. If you live in Okalahoma, make double sure you let him know the next time he is up for election by voting for someone else.

Not that voting matters, of course.

Source

RipTen Review: Fortune Summoners – Secret of the Elemental Stone (PC)

Gavin Bard — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:00:42 +0000

There are a few things I just can’t resist in this world. Chinese buffets, performance art involving two guys in colorful masks having a choreographed battle, radical girls who don’t shave their pits, and that strangely appealing smell of gasoline are a handful of them. One that might trump all those things combined, which I think would be an anarcha-feminist buffet in a lucha mask doused in gasolene, is quirky dōjin soft.

So I guess my perfect thing would be an anarcha-feminist buffet in a lucha mask doused in gasolene and developed by a small group of people independently in Japan. Don’t you judge me.

For those who don’t routinely stroll down the video game paths less traveled, dōjin soft is the rough Japanese equivalent of western indie games. Some dōjin soft will base their games on existing material or character designs, much like dōjinshi, but most are based on their own original ideas. Unlike western indie games where the focus has shifted to the realm of the console marketplaces, games in this category are overwhelming released on the PC. Very few end up over here in any easily accessible or translated form.

The odds are, if you’ve played any dōjin games before, you played something from the Touhou Project or one of the slightly experimental titles that show up on Steam from time to time, like Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale and Chantelise – A Tale of Two Sisters. Both of those games were translated and released in America by Carpe Fulgur, an indie localization company who deserve multiple rounds of applause both for taking the chance on these games and giving them absolutely fantastic translations. Conveniently enough, they also localized Fortune Summoners, which is what put this game on my radar.

Fortune Summoners is a 2D action-RPG platformer with puzzle elements and, obviously, a very thick anime influence. I have the suspicion that a lot of you are going to read that line and immediately go out and play this, but you should probably keep reading. Going back to the anime comparison, this is a magical girl show in side-scrolling form. It follows three classmates who attend a rural magic school through their various adventures and surprisingly well done character development. All of the characters have great interactions, and the story itself, while having little more than standard anime-like progression, hits some nice high points. I have to assume a lot of that is owed to Carpe Fulgur’s great localization.

It is also super cutesy. Cutesy enough that I can’t imagine how creepy the messageboard posts about this game are going to be if it gets popular. They will probably have more moe than the three stooges. There were definitely a couple parts where the budding friendship between the main characters made me raise an eyebrow and go “I hope this doesn’t turn into Blue Drop.”

There is one element of dōjin games that I haven’t mentioned yet- many of them aren’t particularly accessible to anyone outside of their target niche. This can be for various reasons. Sometimes the quality is just too low for the average western gamer, sometimes if they aren’t translated the language barrier is too much to get through, sometimes there are tentacle scenes. Erotic tentacle scenes. Fortune Summoner’s specific problem involves its learning curve and combat system.

This game is hard. Japan hard. There really isn’t a way around that. It isn’t like, say, AMY where the difficulty comes from poor decisions and shoddy programming, but the gameplay will certainly take most people an extended amount of time to get used to. If you fire up Fortune Summoners and play it as the side-scrolling hack-and-slash it looks like it should be, you are going to be more frustrated than a politician with morals. This is more of a tactical game, almost playing like an old school arcade beat-em-up at times. Timing is absolutely everything.

There are some things that just don’t help no matter what though. The controls are touchy, and every character seems to be running on ice. This makes platforming as well as dodging enemies- both crucially important to surviving- quite difficult. The enemies are certainly never going to cut you any slack either, as the game’s default difficulty is “easy” for a reason. They are just unrelenting. I found myself in plenty of “fuck this game” situations where the enemies would just pin me against a wall and slaughter me all because I mistimed one block. I don’t want to call it cheap, because it strikes me that the enemies are unforgiving on purpose, but that certainly doesn’t dull the seething rage over multiple party wipes.

The friendly AI in Fortune Summoners sort of shines though. You can tweak their performance and make them play exactly as you want, choosing what moves or spells they use and what situations they use their magic in. You’ll want to mess around with this, as you will definitely find yourself relying on the AI more often than you would usually. It certainly could have been deeper, but it was also way deeper than I expected it to be.

Since “Ghosts and Goblins frustratingly hard” is aimed directly at their target demographic, that really isn’t enough to take many points off Fortune Summoners arbitrary numerical score. Sadly, the game does find some ways to nickle and dime itself down. There are technical issues that might sprout up on you. I suffered through massive slowdown in menus and some fight scenes, which was linked to running multiple monitors and may or may not be a Windows 7 issue as well. Another issue is that the game can only be played in windowed, zoomed 1280 by 960 resolution, or full screen with stretching. With more and more people making the plunge into larger monitors, that ends up becoming a bit of an issue as well.

The quirks aren’t limited to tech either. The seemingly convenient “quick heal” button ends up being relatively useless as it has an inexplicable cool down timer. Enemies have infinite MP while you can’t even purchase MP restoring items in shops, you can only loot them. (Edit: I was wrong, as Tim in the comments helpfully pointed out, MP restoring items are available in certain shops as you progress. I must have given up on buying them too soon.) You have to sheath your sword in order to interact with anything at all, which might not sound so bad but trust me- it gets tedious. Some of the quests and how to trigger them are maddeningly vague, which will send you running around quite often. Seeing those same locations over and over again makes the game seem smaller and more repetitive than it actually is.

When you do the math, it really comes down to your personal preference. After I got the hang of the combat system, I had a fun time with this game despite its issues. It is a different take on the action RPG genre, and it features a nice, light little anime plot with some nicely done character development. A welcome departure from the bleak, gory, blood-filled, anime and games I am generally entertained by. I’d suggest most people check out the demo first before they commit one way or the other though.

At the very least it will give you something to cleanse your pallet with when you are done playing Katawa Shoujo.

Pervert.

Here’s the Rundown:

+ D’awwww look at all those adorable slimes.
+ Well programmed AI.
+ Solid plot and characters.
+ Unique combination of genres.

- Technical issues and gameplay quirks make things more difficult than they should be.
- Already really fucking difficult with some time needed for players to adjust to the combat, which might turn off some people. /coughcasualscough
- Almost comically vague quest hints leading to backtracking hurts the stories flow and makes things feel slightly tedious. Not to mention it being the definition of a slow starter.
- Could stand to stay at $15 permanently instead of rising up to a $20 full price- it is much easier to suggest this game at $10 or $15 than $20.

7 and 7.5 represent a game that overall manages to be worth a playthrough, just not worth your money. These scores are for games that are relatively good, but you would generally only consider them as a rental.

Fortune Summoners – Secret of the Elemental Stone was Developed by Lizsoft and Published in America by Carpe Fulgur. It was released in America on January 30th, 2012 and in Japan in 2008 or something. I couldn’t figure it out. Google is hard and I’m lazy sometimes. Hence why most of the screenshots up there are from the Japanese version- loading FRAPS is too much effort. The game is available on Steam for $20 and will be available on Gamersgate soon as well. The copy used in this review was purchased by the reviewer because he can’t ever get enough Japanese bullshit, and played to completion in roughly 20 hours. PS: Rin is my favorite in Katawa Shoujo <3

Harmonix Head is Americans for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow’s Sugar Daddy

Gavin Bard — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:00:41 +0000

I really hate politics. At least, I hate the way politics actually work in this country. I won’t bore you with the details of my political belief system or how inherently corrupt essentially all of our everything is right now, but let’s just say I’m probably to the left of Rudolf Rocker at this point. So, to say I greatly enjoy Stephen Colbert’s thorough mocking of the power corporations and the extremely wealthy have over our elections would be an understatement. He does this through the “Americans for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow” super PAC which is only a slightly dumber name than any of the other ones around. They should all just be called “Bend Over and Take This Proles” but I guess politics was never big on truth and transparency.

Of course, this doesn’t have anything to do with video games on the surface, but today the New York Times decided to actually act like journalists and put out a piece on who is financing the various bullshit super PACs that Citizen United enabled to destroy our democracy. It is about what you would expect for most of them. Wall Street puppets for Romney, Texans who don’t actually care about Texas for Perry, Jon Huntsman’s actual daddy for Jon Huntsman, and it goes on. The most surprising name though, is Alex Rigopolus- a name you might recognize as the head of Harmonix. While his $9,600 bucks to Colbert’s super PAC pales in comparison to the millions of dollars being passed around by big business, Christian hate groups, and incestuously swapped back and forth by other super PACs in a sort of “two Super PACs one donation” thing, it is still enough to make him the top donor to a good cause- a cause that shines a light on just how awful money in politics has really gotten.

Maybe I’ll take back all the bad things I said about Rock Band 3.

Source

Top Ten Gaming Wake Up Calls

Gavin Bard — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:00:28 +0000

The problem with having to save the world is that, more often than not, it doesn’t wait until you’ve had a full nights sleep. The eldritch abomination, the never-ending war that has reached your doorstep, the great civilization threatening calamity, a doting mother- these are all things that are sure to pull a hero out of his or her much needed slumber. They are all also very likely to appear in role-playing games. This may seem like a cheap plot device, but it actually makes a lot of sense- it is scientifically proven that you are 60% more likely to participate in an important adventure if you are woken up first, as opposed to just waking up naturally. That must explain why so many games start off with someone rolling out of bed.

10.

To the younger crowd, or to the vile casuals, LucasArts is just the company that makes all the Star Wars and Indiana Jones games and SCUMM is just the name of a Napalm Death album. Well, maybe they don’t think the Napalm Death thing, but they probably think the LucasArts thing. That is a definite shame, as LucasArts were the creators of some of the most important and entertaining adventure games in history including Maniac Mansion, Grim Fandango, and the Monkey Island series to name a select few. One game that gets sort of lost in the shuffle is Loom.

Loom was an ambitious game, and one that took a lot of chances with the adventure genre. It was one of the rare LucasArts adventure games to take itself seriously, and its gameplay was a departure from the conventions of the genre. Instead of using objects to interact with the environment and advance the game’s plot, you used your trusty distaff to play enchanted notes. Think of it as a distant cousin to Ocarina of Time except with way more weaving.

It also started with the main character, Bobbin Threadbare, being woken up on a cliff side by a messenger fairy. Actually, I guess the Ocarina of Time comparison is more apt than I thought. Although Link wasn’t waiting for a swan that visits him on his birthday every year. At least I don’t think he was, sometimes I’m not very observant.

09.

Possibly unpopular opinion time; I really liked Final Fantasy VIII. Despite my cold, tough, grizzled exterior and my overwhelming manliness, my distaste for gender roles begets a soft spot for well told love stories. That was all Final Fantasy VIII was to me, the first real love story in the series. I liked the characters, the story had more than a few genuinely emotional moments, and I’m pretty sure Quistis Trepes is the reason I developed a teacher fetish.

Final Fantasy VIII first gives you control of Squall after he finds himself in the infirmary due to getting the business end of a sword to the forehead in a training session. You would think after a steady dose of head trauma they would encourage you to stay in bed for a little while longer, but not in Balamb Garden! There are dastardly reality threatening plots to unravel and wars to fight- after class and acting like the world’s worst loner tour guide of course.

08.

Arguably the most well known entry in Namco’s legendary Tales series, Tales of Symphonia continued many of the trademarks of its predecessors while updating them for the 3D world of the 2003- spirit summoning, oodles of character development, and bad guys who actually have real reasons and depth to what they do, it was all here. It also featured the generally great Tales battle system, as well as a plot so intricate and well done that it may as well be an anime. Actually, they ended up making it one.

It also features one of the most enduring hero types in RPGs, the dense one. Lloyd Irving might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he makes up for it with logic and loyalty, and also awesome fighting skills. Fighting isn’t the only thing he is adept at though, he can also fall asleep standing up, which is where Tales of Symphonia starts off. I’ve had some boring classes before, I’m looking at you every math class I’ve ever had, but even I don’t think I could doze off on my feet during them. I also don’t think I could protect my friend as she goes on a quest across the world in order to awaken a goddess and save the world. There is way too much to do on the internet first.

07.

Originally scheduled as a launch title for the PlayStation 2, Dark Cloud ended up being released a few months afterward. It became one of the first “must have” RPGs on the console and is remembered pretty fondly for its unique combination of action-RPG and city building mechanics. I’m hard pressed to think of a game released between Dark Cloud and Fable 2 that attempted to mesh the two, let alone succeeding at it. I’m sure you fine readers will remind me of a few in the comments though. Most likely angrily.

Dark Cloud takes a while to get to it, but the game proper starts off after the main character, Toan, is knocked unconscious when his village is destroyed by a giant flying genie who shoots energy beams from his legs. It isn’t all bad though, as a Fairy King wakes him up after transporting all of the villagers away before they can be killed. He also tells Toan that he has to go save the world and rebuild civilization against enormous odds and at a great risk to himself and the friends he makes on his journey. There is always a catch with these magic fairy types.

06.

I vividly remember purchasing this game the day it was released in America, which was now over a decade ago. There are some other games on this list I played before this, but I definitely forgot how old this game was now. Nothing makes you grapple with your own mortality more than video games. Maybe music I guess. Did you know “Calculating Infinity” and “Domestica” both came out over ten years ago now as well? I can’t even fathom how I would have turned into the ~~pretentious~~ musical ~~elitist~~ aficionado I am today without those two albums. If they don’t invent immortality pills soon I’m going to be so pissed.

Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh, video games.

Golden Sun is a game for the GBA that still holds up as one of its better RPGs. An impressive feat considering the longevity of that lovable handheld. It follows another popular character archetype in the silent protagonist Isaac. Isaac has the misfortune of being awoken by his mom when a gigantic boulder is threatening to squash their town. On the list of things to be waken up for, “a huge rock is going to kill us” might be one of the least appealing. Right up there with “you have an appointment with the dentist” and “today is election day.”

05.

Dragon Quest-slash-Warrior, while never as popular in America as its Final Fantasy counterpart, is more popular in Japan than slightly disturbing pornography. It is so popular in fact that, after Dragon Quest III was released, Enix decided to stop selling Dragon Quest games on weekdays because of mass absenteeism to places of education and employment across the country. Who knew the way to defeat wage slavery and the for profit education system was just to release Dragon Quest games?

Depending on who you ask, Dragon Quest III is either the best Dragon Quest game or the second best Dragon Quest game. It really doesn’t fall much further than that. It was such a great representation of traditional Japanese RPGs, and it was a fitting end piece to the original trilogy. It also begins with- you guessed it- the heroes mom waking him up on his sixsteenth birthday so he can meet with the king and be sent on an epic world saving journey. On my sixteenth birthday I got a PS2. Equally as important, honestly.

04.

This could have just as easily been Ocarina of Time, but I’m a retro gamer at my core so I’ve always considered this to be the best game in the series. Besides, this whole list could have been Legend of Zelda games. It would probably be easier to pick a game that didn’t start with Link waking up.

How much do I actually have to say about A Link to the Past?

If your answer is “more than that” you haven’t played enough video games yet.

03.

Where do you even start with Planescape: Torment? One of the single greatest gaming experiences in the history of our fine hobby, Planescape: Torment made breaking genre conventions its job. This game has so many choices and so many consequences that it makes Deus Ex look like a rails shooter. You could essentially avoid every combat situation in the game with the right amount of stealth and dialog choices. In a way, Planescape: Torment was one of the first examples of a successful narrative based game, and more of an interactive novel than a traditional RPG. This is why it was so perfect though.

If ever I could pinpoint the exact moment I decided I would rip my shirt off, bare my chest, and defend PC gaming to my very death, it would be the first time I played Planescape: Torment.

Of all the dudes-waking-up moments on this list, Planescape: Torment probably sports the darkest. The Nameless One isn’t woken up by his mom, he is woken up in a mortuary. He doesn’t need to meet the king for his birthday and save the world, he needs to recover his lost memories after being killed.

If you take anything from this list, it should be going out and playing Planescape: Torment. Oh, and also you should be entertained by the list. I forgot about that part.

02.

Chrono Trigger is perhaps the best known example of this. Since it is considered to be one of the best RPGs ever made, it is understandable. I certainly wouldn’t argue anyone who told me it was, although since this is number two you have probably deduced that there is a game I would rank above it. We will get to that.

In Chrono Trigger, the titular-minus-the-H character is woken up by- you guessed it- his mom. Instead of being sent directly to save the world from the time devouring evil, he is sent to the Millenial Fair for merrymaking and a good time.

Until the whole rip in the space-time continuum sends him to save the world from the time devouring evil.

Better than most state fairs I’ve been to. Usually they just have funnel cake.

01.

Earthbound is my number one choice for every list ever. Best RPG? Earthbound. Best quirky game? Earthbound. Best first person shooter? Earthbound. Best vegetarian Mexican restaurant in the Philadelphia region? Earthbound. Luckily for me, Earthbound is actually relevant to this list so I don’t have to bullshit you about how good its veggie burritos are.

Ness, the quiet hero of Onett, is just a normal kid with a hyper-intelligent dog until he is woken up in the middle of the night by a meteorite crashing to earth in the hills outside of his home. As any curious kid would do, he eventually goes to explore before being turned back by the long arm of the law. With nothing else to do, he goes back to sleep.

A full night’s sleep is not in the cards for Ness, however. When his frustratingly annoying neighbor wakes him up later on with the incessent knocking of “shave and a hair cut” he finally gets his chance to see the meteorite up close. Then he fights a huge silver robot and a time traveling bee tells him that he has to somehow save the world from an evil alien that might also be a fetus. Don’t worry, it all makes perfect sense in the end.

Oh, Itoi. Don’t ever change.

Did I miss anything? Are there any heroes that could have used a few extra hours sleep that I didn’t include? Let us know in the comments.

RipTen Retrograde: Fallout 2

Gavin Bard — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:30:06 +0000

So the last time I did one of these for RipTen was over a year and a half ago. I started doing them for my own personal gain on my Tumblr, but now that I’ve become too cool for Tumblr and just use it to post screenshots from anime, I figured it was about time to bring it back to you fine readers. Due to the large amount of time between entries, you might need a bit of a refresher on the concept. Luckily, I’ve come prepared-

I guess I should explain what this is.

This isn’t really a traditional review of a game, not that I’m particularly known for my traditional reviews or anything. Sure, there is a score at the end, but that is just because most people need to grind up quantified scores and inject them into the webbing of their toes or else they get the cold sweats. I don’t like when people detox during my articles- it lowers my hit counts. This “Retrograde” experiment isn’t so much a review as it is a stream of consciousness commentary on interesting screenshots from gaming’s past. Sometimes there will be anecdotes or personal stories, other times I will actually discuss the game, and at still other times I’ll probably just make borderline offensive jokes, beat a running gag into the ground, or spoil the ending for you. Think Mystery Science Theater 3000 meets me looking for an excuse to dick around playing awesome retro video games instead of doing real work. Or a tongue-in-cheek “Let’s Play” that I’m too lazy to record. This might seem familiar to the three and a third of you who have followed my writing elsewhere, and it generally seems to entertain one of you, so what the hell- let’s slap a fresh coat of paint on this lemon and call it a Chryslus .

Last time on the Retrograde, which I think is what we are officially calling this… thing, I covered Fallout. Logically, that means I should play through the sequel- which, as you may have guessed, is called Fallout 2. How is that for continuity?

Fallout 2 is actually a great example of there being not only a divide between a game’s fanbase, but a dissonance between how critics analyze games and how gamers analyze games. Nobody would ever say it is a bad game obviously, but whether or not it is better than the original, and therefor the best game in the franchise, is often a pretty heated debate.

As with the entire Fallout universe, the plot and story of Fallout 2 are incredibly strong. You are the Chosen One, the descendent of the Vault Dweller from the original Fallout. Apparently they weren’t really big on first names in the wasteland. This time around, you need to find Vault 13 and get its Garden of Eden Creation Kit in order to save your village from a deadly drought. Problems with water seem to follow that family wherever they go.

If I had a nickle for every time somebody said that to me.

Not much has changed aesthetically from the first Fallout. The graphics are almost exactly the same, and while most of the gameplay is similar at its core, it has been made more complex and diverse. More weapons, better options for building a character, and more detailed quests give Fallout 2 even more replayability and entertainment than the first one. Which is why this Retrograde is about seven thousand images long.

If you linger too long here, you might have to worry about a bunch of angry Somalians. And maybe even Josh Hartnett.

I don’t really know which is worse.

Literally the only negative thing I could say about Fallout 2 is that the animation for people running in excitement/fear makes me want to drive my fist right through the monitor. You can practically hear them making some obnoxiously awful noise- especially the children in this game. I can’t even count how many times I planted dynamite on some kids and blew them up because of it. I plan on running for public office just so my opponent can use that last statement out of context and put it in an attack ad. “Radical Gavin Bard ‘planted dynamite on children and blew them up.’ Is this someone you want in charge of your state?” And everyone can go “oh yeah, totally.”

It would be convenient if this game sucked, just because I could use this picture and be all “look it’s poop and this game is poop lol.” I could write for Leno.

Ah- a landmark moment. This is the first time in gaming history that you could have a same sex marriage. It is often erroneously referred to as the first instance of a main character being able to be a homosexual but as far as I know that was actually Ultima VI, where you could get “entertained” by the gender of your choice. Weird how the Fallout universe is way more tolerant of same sex relationships than 30 or so of our states. I guess in the wasteland there are more important things to be concerned about than what people with matching parts do together.

“Hello ‘Vaultdweller6969′. Why don’t you take a seat?”

One of the most unique things about Fallout 2 is how self aware this game is. It breaks the fourth wall more often than Deadpool hanging out with Animal Man at a party thrown by the Invisibles.

I bet you can’t figure out why I took this screenshot?

It’s because it looks like a penis.

That’s why.

A penis.

One of the main complaints about Fallout 2 is that there are so many pop culture references it almost weighs the game down. I took screenshots of all them, from ‘Gordon of Gecko’ to A Boy and His Car to Nine Inch Nails, and ended up with about 500 of them. They can be a little bit forced, but I’ll let this one go since the rest of the game is, you know, as close to perfect as something can be without genetic alterations.

Some are more forced than others.

One of the best additions to Fallout 2 is being able to edit your NPCs fighting tendencies. It still has its issues, but any control is good control. It makes the NPCs so much more useful than in the first game, although they still aren’t mandatory.

Hold #3 out of 1004 in Chris Jericho’s movelist.

Sadly your spouses clinginess leads to situations where a quick divorce is needed…

…Old testament style. Lock and load Moses!

I and I fin you ‘n Steppin Razor the good herb fren. Maelcum’s an ‘is rightous dub, mon.

Before someone says that’s racist, it was a Neuromancer reference. Read more books.

Fallout 2 continues the Fallout tradition of stuffing the game full of detail like a post-apocalyptic chicken stuffed in a post-apocalyptic duck stuffed in a post-apocalyptic turkey. The wasteland always feels so oddly logical, from the buildings that people have taken over to being able to make a career as a porn star, that even the most outlandish twists or settings still get slotted into the game’s history perfectly. Fallout 2 was one of the most fleshed out games around.

The Chosen One shares my opinion on organized religion apparently. The “Overbearingly Obnoxious Atheist” trait comes in handy.

I think the idea of Lieutenant Dangle palling around with Lord Humongous is… disturbing. To say the least.

And what’s the deal with airline peanuts? Hey, another round of iguana-on-a-stick for me and my friends!

It’s “burning out his fuse up here alone.” Just ask Shatner, he will probably still be around in 2200.

THIS IS WHAT HUBOLOGISTS REALLY BELIEVE

While the quality of the game has improved almost across the board, and odd exclusion to that improvement is the lack of voice acting. I don’t know if it’s because the game is longer or if it’s because they actually did cut the total of ‘talking heads’ in half, but it seems like there are way fewer characters with actual recorded lines in Fallout 2. That is pretty much nitpicking, but I had to find something negative to say or else I would lose my Snarky Video Game Journalist Club membership.

You get some great moments of drama due to the intricate story and how much it intertwines with the original game. There is really a lot of delicious atmosphere to absorb.

Nice to see the Atlantic City Boardwalk hasn’t changed.

This is pretty much what I say before I troll the internet for dates.

I didn’t know the Enclave recruited from Razak’s Roughnecks.

I agree with the Chosen One on religion AND politics, wow. They got really progressive two hundred years in the future after a nuclear holocaust.

The last boss is pretty anti-climatic, especially if you’ve played as an intelligent character (which all real men should), but it doesn’t really matter. In the end, Fallout 2 is a game that is so close to perfect that the only bad thing I can say about it is Fallout Tactics followed it. The advancements in combat, the amount of options for guns, perks, and character development, and an engaging story make this one of those holy relics of PC gaming that everybody has to play. In my opinion, Fallout 2 is the best game of the series. Now, commence the arguing! Guitar solo!

9 and 9.5 represent the pinnacle of the genre, a game that defines what that genre should be about. These scores are for games that you not only feel would be worth your purchase, but you would actually try to convince your friends to buy them as well.

Fallout 2 was developed by Black Isle Studios and published by Interplay Entertainment for Windows, and then the Mac three years later because nobody plays games on that thing! The game released in North America on September 30th, 1998, which is a year to the day after the first Fallout game. Spooky. The copy used in this review was for Windows and was bought out of a box at an indoor dirt mall a dozen years ago. Fallout 2 was played until completion, how could I resist?

Do you have a game you’d like to see featured in this ~~stupid idea~~ creative and original work of game journalism art? If so, let me or RipTen know on Twitter, or in the comments on this very site!

Next Time on the Retrograde: Hydlide.

Son of a bitch.

“Reflect” Tech Demo is Portal With Bells, Whistles, Real-Time Path Tracing

Gavin Bard — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:30:09 +0000

One of the best parts of being committed to PC gaming is seeing impressive new tech get rolled out. Reflect is a part game, part tech demo created by the IGAD program at the NHTV University of Applied Sciences in Breda, Netherlands. It may look a bit Portal-y, but the difference is that it uses the Brigade, a real-time path tracing engine that represents the future of gaming graphics. Essentially, path-tracing is a stochastic process that… you know, I’ll just let the developers explain this one. I always assumed the thing that was going to replace rasterization was going to be space magic.

Path tracing is a process that constructs a large number of paths between the camera and light sources (typically via scene surfaces) to estimate the color of each pixel. This is a stochastic process, which causes the noise in the images. Although more samples would reduce the noise, path tracing is rather compute-intensive.

The noise they are talking about is pretty obvious within the video, but it doesn’t entirely obscure what an advancement this is going to be in rendering technology. By moving to stochastic processes as opposed to the more common deterministic ones used in rendering, it gives a more realistic example of shadows and lightning.

If you want to download Reflect or read more about how this works as explained by the people who actually created it as opposed to being explained by the guy who once almost started a fire trying to install a motherboard, check it out here.

RipTen Exclusive: Leaked Government Documents Regarding Occupy Saffron

Gavin Bard — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:01:41 +0000

DIRECTOR: Yes, what is it?

AGENT: Uh, sir, I’m here to update you on the situation in Saffron City.

DIRECTOR: Ah yes, of course. Have a seat.

(PAUSE, RUSTLING PAPERS)

AGENT: Sir, we are talking on the phone.

DIRECTOR: Look I’m a very busy man, I don’t have time to debate whether or not we are talking on the phone. Just get to the information.

AGENT: Of course. As you know, since the pokémon took to the streets, we’ve tried numerous tactics in order to silence their grievances. None of which have seemed to be very effective.

DIRECTOR: Really? Shooting Smoke Balls at them didn’t help?

AGENT: No sir.

DIRECTOR: What about spraying them with Flame Orb spray?

AGENT: No sir. We believe that strategy may have been what caused the violence during the Vermillion City port closing.

DIRECTOR: Nonsense, authoritarian aggression has never lead to violence.

(THE FAINT SOUND OF A PENCIL TAPPING AGAINST A TABLE)

DIRECTOR: Have you just tried beating them with sticks until they went back into their Pokéballs?

AGENT: Yes sir.

DIRECTOR: Did it work?

(PAUSE)

AGENT: No sir. Somehow Jubilife TV got their hands on the footage and broadcasted it to the majority of the country. It galvanized public support in their favor.

DIRECTOR: Who the hell do they think they are, acting like journalists all of a sudden.

AGENT: I know sir, it was unexpected. They are the only network not owned by Silph, so there was little we could do.

DIRECTOR: This is ruining my incredibly expensive lunch, I’m going to have to just throw it out now. You better have some good news for me.

AGENT: Of course sir. Ever since the government gave us expanded power under the Pokédex Act, we’ve been better able to better monitor the radicalized element of this movement. I’ve prepared a report on those we consider to be the most dangerous to our cause. I’m faxing you their photos now.

DIRECTOR: I have a fax machine?

AGENT: Yes, sir. I believe you keep your newspapers on it.

(THE SOOTHING TONES OF FAXING)

BULBASAUR

Bulbasaur came onto our radar after being arrested for throwing red paint on the president of Silph Co during a demonstration against their policies supporting underground drilling for Technical Machine materials. Following a series of escalating incidents, including a suspected act of sabotage against the construction in Lavender Town, Bulbasaur eventually became a leader of a small group of like minded grass pokémon. He used his charisma and problem solving abilities to convince his group to attack and, in their words, liberate the Safari Zone and prevent the large pokémon capturing tourism industry from advancing their goals there.

The Warden has been missing since the attack.

CHARIZARD

No pokémon has run up such a laundry list of treasonous charges as Charizard. The leading supporter of the “Pokéganda of the deed” school of thought, Charizard has been involved in the bombing of the SS Anne, occupations and subsequent arsons of multiple Pokémarts across Kanto and Johto, and the deadly attacks against government officials in Lavendar Town, just to name a few. He has avoided capture so far, mostly because he is a huge fire breathing dragon and our tactics are hampered by the law not allowing us to use Gyrados’ Hydro Pump to disperse crowds.

JYNX

Jynx has been arrested the most times for trying to incite pokériots across the region, as well as for conspiring to assassinate a member of the Silph board of directors. She publishes a newsletter that is distributed amongst the region and asks for a revolution against what she calls the pokétriarchy. She has lead multiple actions against pokémon breeders and was jailed for distributing material encouraging pokémon breeding control. After we took her into custody following the bombing of the SS Anne, we offered her immunity if she would turn in the other members on this list. She responded by throwing ice in the agents face. It is possible we may be able to deport her to Hoenn.

ASH KETCHUM

Perhaps the most dangerous person on this list, Ash Ketchum is a traitor to trainers everywhere. He treats his pokémon as if they were his equals, encourages them to think on their own, and enables them through his optimism. While Ash has kept himself out of legal trouble, his connection to the above pokémon cannot be ignored and we suspect he has been helping smuggle them across our check points. There are rumors that he plans on starting a commune where the pokémon can live in peace and pursue their own goals. We are hoping the ideological split between him and the Meowthists will prevent this idea from being successful.

DIRECTOR: Disgusting. They should be happy we stuff them in tiny balls and use them for our own personal gain, without us doing that their lives would be free and meaningless! They have to understand that the few dozen elite trainers know better than the thousands of them.

AGENT: Of course sir.

DIRECTOR: This is all good information though, we will certainly be able to use it to our advantage. You’ve done some great work. I’ll have to make sure you are acknowledged for it Agent… uh… Agent… uh… what was your name again?

(AUDIBLE SIGH)

AGENT: Gary, sir. Codename Blue. How do you always forget that?

Zelda: The Lost Oracle is Fan Made, Awesome

Gavin Bard — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:00:39 +0000

Joel Furtado’s trailer for “The Lost Oracle” is absolutely gorgeous. Breathtaking even. The Wind Waker inspired visuals really come alive and work perfectly for an animated project, which almost pains me to admit consider one of my biggest mistakes as a gamer was complaining about them at the time- I was much less refined in 2003. Wait a second though, I see you opening your wallet and flinging dollar bills at the screen. Don’t get too excited. As a testament to the cruel, hard realities of the universe we live in, it is a fan-made labor of love to one of the most iconic series of all time and not an Actual Thing that is Happening. Although, as a fringe candidate for the New Jersey state senate maybe I can start my political corruption off right by forcing him to turn it into a full-run animated series.

Regardless of animation quality, if he makes Link say “excuse me, Princess” even once I’m going to send Joel off to Guantanamo.

IRL is a Short Look at WoW Addiction

Gavin Bard — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:30:58 +0000

Video games can be addictive. I’d hazard the vast majority of those reading this have an intimate knowledge of that fact. Even if you aren’t a gaming addict in a general sense, there is still probably one game where you had to collect every piece of coinfeather and complete the 300 journal recording entries or else you got the shakes and a cold sweat- it is just the nature of being a gamer. There have been many solid studies and editorials about what exactly makes games so addictive and how the rise in achievement based gameplay over the last handful of years has helped accelerate these tendencies.

Still, the grandaddy of them all is World of Warcraft. Okay, well, the grandaddy is probably Starcraft, but the daddy is definitely World of Warcraft. Either way it is one addiction enabling family.

In fact, the King of Ripten himself Chad Lakkis overcame his very own WoW addiction so he could become the powerhouse he is today. So the odds are that you too can relate in some way to Anthony Rosnar’s “IRL – In Real Life.” In it, he lays his own addiction on the table and shows the sacrifices he made in order to satiate it. More importantly, it shows his journey to overcoming the addiction and gaining control over his life. It is pretty inspiring and could be a nice little kick in the Paladin for people who may want to kick their own habit.

My addiction you ask?

Cheetahmen II. My world is a bleak one.

RipTen Review: AMY (XBLA)

Gavin Bard — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:30:59 +0000

The Reviewer

(not) by

Edgar Allan Poe

To you the gamer pessimist, I ask you honor one request;
My credibility and past you might not know,
But I promise I write not in jest, heed my words about this mess.
Regarding AMY I attest, no matter your opinions on game journos
Trust the reviewers, this game blows

You might think we’re mostly wrong, every review same dance and song,
our arguments so rarely strong. It makes you skeptical of scores this low.
You start to think “it can’t be as bad as this, can’t trust them further than I can spit,
Besides Jim Sterling hated it. What the hell does that guy know?”
Look- trust the reviewers, this game blows.

For ten dollars it might tempt, but cheap doesn’t make its quality exempt
I hope your purchase I preempt, take that wallet and keep it closed
There is nothing worth your money here, a survival horror game without fear,
controls so bad you’ll shed a tear, the gameplay needs much NoDoz.
Trust the reviewers, this game blows.

It must be said- AMY isn’t lacking heart, but that is where compliments and I must part
This game marks a trainwreck as its start, an opening so apropos.
Like a child’s plate with spinach, I don’t think this game is finished.
At no point do glitches diminish, but your frustration will sure grow.
Trust the reviewers, this game blows.

Graphically it may seem decent, but not for gaming eras recent.
The animations are malfeasant, look at how she holds that phone!
AMY’s strength is its aesthetics, but they’re still as clear as Dianetics
Even with flawless cosmetics, it wouldn’t cover up what we know
Trust the reviewers, this game blows

Just playing AMY is energy sapping, three hours in and you’ll be napping
I’d rather listen to Randy Savage rapping. The more you play the more time slows.
You’d think your thumbs had the plague, with controls that feel like you have stones for legs,
No solace in a plot so god damn vague- AMY has far more cons than it has pros.
Trust the reviewers, this game blows.

In the loosest sense it is like Ico, except a direct comparison would be psycho,
the difference too far to be be seen by Tycho. For arguments sake lets juxtapose.
AMY’s puzzles are simplistic, each one solvable by methods heuristic.
Did I mention Amy’s autistic? Probably not, I’m bad at aping Poe.
Still- Trust the reviewers, this game blows.

AMY also suffers from awful combat, every attack is inaccurate and flat.
Lana has Johnny Bench fingers but needs his bat. Is that a crowbar or a pillow?
The game’s design flaws are massive, and more obvious when your character is active.
It’s an Occupier with a Gene Sharp book forcing you to be passive, a strategy I oppose.
Trust the reviewers- this game blows.

It isn’t so bad its good its just terrible, playing AMY as an experience is unbearable.
It’s so bad I had to rip off Poe for this parable. There are no highs in AMY, just lows.
I know we reviewers aren’t always right, and you may want to play AMY just for spite,
but playing this was a true bleak plight. It drove me crazy and it shows.
Seriously, just this once, trust the reviewers- this game blows.

Here’s The Rundown:

+ It doesn’t look terrible.

+ Flashback was an awesome game.

+ There are some decent ideas buried under all of the things that don’t work. A sequel would probably end up being okay if they hear the near universal criticism and adjust accordingly.

+ It is still way better than Rogue Warrior.

- Just one enormous escort mission/fetch quest. Should have made it timed just to get the unholy trifecta. Even then, it could have worked if it wasn’t so technically broken. At least you could stuff Ashley in a trashcan.

- Checkpoints are as rare as unicorns and as reliable as vertically oriented economic systems. AMY embodies the idea of fake difficulty

- I couldn’t find rhymes for “generally terrible voice acting.”

- Ten dollars more than I would pay for an unfinished beta.

- It gives Shaq Fu a run for the money as Paul Cuisset’s most puzzling mistake.

1 (RIP) to 4 are varying degrees of a bad game. A 1 (RIP) being a game you would actually pay money to not play, and a 4 is something that just barely fails to be mediocre. Read more about our scoring system in detail here.

AMY was developed by VectorCel and published by Lexis Numérique. It was released on January 11th, 2012 on XBLA for 800 MSP and January 17th, 2012 on PSN for $10. I think that’s the same, I was never good at converting fake currency into real currency. Haha, I’m just kidding, all currency is fake! Death to capitalism! A copy of the game was actually purchased for the purpose of this review, seriously. I’m a starving artist and I bought this thing for you people. The game was played until chapter 5 and wasn’t completed because life is just too fucking short. And yes I know Ico doesn’t rhyme with psycho before you say anything, I’m banking on most of you not realizing that.

RipTen Review: The Binding of Isaac (PC)

Gavin Bard — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:00:59 +0000

Once, during a particularly bummed-out period of my life, I prayed. Things just weren’t looking good to me at the time, and I didn’t know how to fix them. It wasn’t because of the world’s slow descent into madness, corporate malfeasance and control over our very well being, or even the rampant police brutality involved in attempting to quell our rights to peacefully assemble and protest. The real reason things seemed so bleak to me was that, and this pains me to say, I had become disinterested in video games.

Major releases no longer excited me. The only time I could ever muster up a crap to give about AAA titles is if they were made out of gold and around the waist of gymnastic Mexicans in colorful masks. Seeing the flashy ads and hearing the breathless anticipation from the majority of the community just did nothing for me any more. The direction the industry was taking started to make me feel less like I was a part of a collective culture and more like I was being roughly used.

Before, it used to feel like a company wanted to make me happy with their products, because then they would probably get my money if they did. We were given dozens of patches, easy access to multiplayer, and free expansion packs. Now, in a world where draconian copy protection and $60 games with $75 of DLC on the disc you already paid for is considered par for the course, companies seem to no longer care about how we feel as long as we keep spreading the nubile lips of our wallets for them. Consumers barely ever get the dinner any more, we just get fucked.

This.

Did I just become too jaded? Have I, a champion of games as an ageless artform that can be enjoyed by anyone, begun to grow out of the very hobby I championed? I was lost and, with nowhere else to turn, I got on my knees, rested my elbows on the old futon in my parent’s attic, clasped my fists together until they turned whiter than my paper-hued skintone, and prayed.

“Are you there God? It’s me Gavin.”

And, to my infinite surprise as an atheist, he answered.

“Sup bro?”

There were no bright lights or beautiful music- he was just there, lounging back on the futon. God looked a lot like George Carlin, which was both fitting and ironic at the same time. He wore sensible shoes, a pair of expensive-looking slacks, a black blazer, and a Jawbreaker t-shirt. I wanted to ask him whether he preferred “Dear You” or “24 Hour Revenge Therapy” but just couldn’t find the words. I was speechless, as I assume most people would be in this highly unlikely, but entirely true, situation. Here I was, just a video game commentator on the low end of the totem-pole, in a face-to-face meeting with the creator of all things.

God waited patiently for me to say something, but rightfully figured out I probably wasn’t going to. “A little surprised to see me I guess?”

I nodded, “I just figured if you didn’t really make house calls to people like me. What with my love of sinning and all.”

God laughed, “Hey man, you went through 9 years of catholic school. After that I can’t blame you for not believing in me,” he sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees, “but I’m a pretty busy cat, gotta run this whole show and such. You’ve got some spiritual problem you need to run by me, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” I delivered my words with all the eloquence of a third grader trying to recite the St. Crispin’s Day speech. “I don’t know if I can like video games any more.”

God laughed again, “That is your problem? This is going to be easier than I thought.”

He reached over and touched his hand to the side of my computer. It glowed for a second and booted up instantly. On my screen was a game I knew I didn’t install. It was called The Binding of Isaac.

Quite Sure.

“This, my son,” God said, “is the answer to your prayers. Literally. Because you just prayed to me.”

“What the hell is that?”

He smirked, “It is the newest title by Edmund McMillen, the dark artistic mastermind of Gish, Coil, Aether, and Super Meat Boy fame. It is loosely based on a particularly gruesome and disturbing story from my all-time best selling hit novel, the Bible. You may have heard of it.”

I had. “Aren’t most of the stories in that book gruesome and disturbing?”

“Everybody’s a critic,” God said. “Play the damn game.”

I sat down in the red, mostly uncomfortable seat from the Spectrum that I call a computer chair, placed my fingers in their familiar WASD-related positions, and braced myself for this experience.

“Can I play it in full screen?” I asked.

“No, it plays in a window. Just click start.”

“Well can I at least change the resolution of the window?”

“Jesus Christ, just play the game already. Your editor is going to want the review by tomorrow. I know that because I’m God.”

God was getting impatient. I remembered the Old Testament from school, as well as the fact that all of Dave Oshry’s muscles have their own pair of rippling biceps, so I wasn’t really into the idea of being on either of their bad sides- I clicked start and was sucked in immediately. Just listening to Danny Baranowsky‘s brilliantly composed score was enough to melt some of my worries away.

RipTen Review: Bastion (XBLA)

Gavin Bard — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:00:56 +0000

They say the best reviews start at the beginning.

The reviewer prides himself with his ability to write almost nonsensically conceptual video game reviews. Hell, it’s probably the only reason anybody actually goes out of their way to read any of the words he ferociously taps onto the internet. Even at their basest, people enjoy concepts. They like being presented with things that are off the beaten path and interesting or, at the very least, different. He likes to think that even though he’s pretty much only known as the guy who turns video game reviews into short stories and vehemently defended Homefront, it’s his actual writing ability that keeps people coming back his words. A good concept might get people to notice something, but they aren’t going to pet a cat too much unless there is something of substance holding up its fur.

When the reviewer first started seeing previews of Bastion, its artistic value and direction were enough to win him over. It is an absolutely gorgeous game, and one that stands out even as many developers have begun to experiment with unique art styles. After reading about the game more and seeing more previews and developer diaries, it started to become obvious to him that Bastion’s most conceptual and original feature wasn’t its art style though, as gorgeous as it may be- it was the narration. Supergiant Game’s seemed to decide that dynamic announcing should no longer be the property of computer animated men in pads banging against each other. Still, the reviewed had been around the block a few times and to say he had a jaded man wouldn’t be an overstatement. At this point that seeing things that look interesting in a preview didn’t get his goose bumps rising like it once did. Even with fantastic art and an interesting take on narration, he wasn’t going to put the Action RPG horse before the Action RPG cart.

Well, after convincing himself that showering is an unnecessary distraction, the reviewer hasn’t been able to peel himself away from it for three days now. It’s safe to say that Bastion has more substance to it than a MLB power hitter in the 90s.

He tries to contemplate what one thing makes this game step up onto a wooden crate and stand a head above all the others at the video game parade. The reviewer finds himself with a rare lack of words. Is it the art? Watching the colorful world build up around you as you hack and slash and shoot your way through its dangers never gets dull. Even those dangers are vibrant and full of so much personality you would want to sit down and have a few drinks with them if they weren’t trying so hard to kill you.

Maybe, the reviewer thinks, it’s Bastion’s personality in general that makes it so great. While every game tries to find its own little chunk of personality, Bastion practically drips it until you are getting it on your shoes. Every nook and cranny of the game is bursting with it, thanks to to the aforementioned narrator. There is no hyperbolic statement hyperbolic enough to do the importance of the narrator, and how well it succeeds, any real justice. If Logan Cunningham and the writer’s at Supergiant don’t win awards- any awards- for what they’ve accomplished here, the world should just collectively acknowledge the fact awards have been rendered meaningless. Sometimes you even feel like you aren’t playing to find an important item or to get to the next level, but are just trying to move along to make the narrator talk more. That is a good thing since the entirety of Bastion’s story, which is rich and superbly crafted, is experienced through the narrator’s tranquil voice.

You know even if Bastion didn’t have great gameplay, the reviewer would still have recommended it heavily based on its aesthetic value. He knows his target demographic, and himself, well enough to know that they will take a hit in gameplay if the rest of the game does something unique. You can always just sort that stuff out with an arbitrary number at the end of the review anyway. Luckily for the reviewer, the gaming public, and Supergiant’s bank account, Bastion doesn’t suffer from a shortfall in any area.

If you like action RPGs, and the reviewer certainly expects that you do, you should probably quit reading this and just throw your money at your Xbox already and make it give you this game. Bastion takes the basic Zelda-like gameplay and makes it deep enough to claim it as its own. It focuses on the different combinations of weapons and upgrades for those weapon, as well as the various liquors of the world that give your character different perks, and rewards you for experimenting with the many combinations of all those elements. As you go through the game, you also collect resources from the old world that help you build and upgrade your homebase, the titular Bastion, in order to make your trip through the shattered world just a little bit simpler. Only a little bit though, because Bastion does not lack in difficulty for you more masochistic types. You can even pray to the game’s various gods to make the game more difficult for you, which is a possible social commentary that the atheistic reviewer can definitely get behind. It’s pretty hard to complain about a game that offers you this many options, two different endings, and a New Game+ for less than the cost of a plate of deep fried food at a middle of the road chain restaurant. The only complaints that can be made are complaints that miss the point to what this game was trying to be. It doesn’t have online multiplayer, but who says it needs it? The levels themselves are fairly straightforward, but who says they can’t be? It doesn’t cause people who play it to rise up and incite revolution in order to create a perfect utopian society, but it never set out to. The reviewer realizes what Bastion set out to do, and he knows it accomplished it to the letter.

When he adds all this together, the reviewer finds himself struggling with reasons to not give Bastion a glowingly high score. Even though he hates all scoring systems in general, he still doesn’t hand scores on the upper end of excellent out lightly. Where can he arbitrarily remove points from Bastion though? Maybe he can say the music is too good and it distracts him from the narrator, who is also too good. Maybe he acts like a loving mother muting her celebration of her kid’s big day in a low contact sport, and take points away because he doesn’t want it going to Supergiant’s head. Or maybe he just says “fuck it” and gives it the score it deserves, that way he can stop writing and go back to playing it again.

I guess since this is my last line, we know which one he chose.

Here’s The Rundown:

+ One of the best gaming experiences of the year, made even better by its low price.

+ The reviewer has been on a pretty good streak when it comes to reviewing good games.

- You haven’t bought it yet.

- The reviewer fears Rogue Warrior 2 will be showing up on his doorstep soon to ruin his good luck.

Bastion was developed by Supergiant Games and published by Warner Bros Games. It will be released on July 20th, 2011 for the XBLA for 1200MP which the reviewer thinks is like fifteen bucks. He doesn’t know though since he is terrible at math. Hence the journalism degree and the writing about video games thing. It was played until completion (except for the War Machete Proving Ground level which is still driving him god damn crazy) including the New Game+, but he completely lost track of time and forgot to keep track of how long it took him. Somewhere between 12 and 1200 hours he would reckon. The reviewer clearly does not count math or estimating time as his strengths.

RipTen Review: Jamestown – Legend of the Lost Colony

Gavin Bard — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:34:08 +0000

If ever there was a game with a premise I wanted to steal and turn into an absolute guarantee for me winning a Nebula Award, it’s Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony.

Jamestown is a shmup created by Final Form Games that fires on every cylinder you could possibly want a shmup to fire on. It is almost patently unbelievable that this is the very first game released by Final Form, as its level of polish is higher than an entire bucket of zrazy. It all starts with the games unique setting. Jamestown tells the story of Sir. Walter Raleigh’s quest to defend the titular settlement from the Spanish, discover the secret of the lost colony of Roanoke, and clear his name after escaping from a stint in the Tower of London. Also he escapes using a spaceship. Also the Spanish have teamed up with aliens to defeat the British. Also this is all on Mars.

Seriously, I know I have a reputation as a flaming liberal, but I am putting myself on record right now and saying I would fully support the Palin or Bachmann ~~Idiocracy awareness tours~~ campaigns if, the next time they decide to just entirely make up something historical because of their tenuous grasp on American history, they just go balls to the wall and say Sir. Walter Raleigh was a freedom fighter who liberated Jamestown from the Spain-Martian armada. That’s way more awesome than saying Paul Revere warned the British in order to protect their gun rights, or that John Quincy Adams was a founding father who fought against slavery when he was 8 years old.

So, to recap, the only things I’ve told you so far are that Jamestown is a shmup, it involves Walter Raleigh shooting aliens on the New New World, and that home-schooling apparently doesn’t work very well for conservatives. Are you buying this game already? Do I even need to talk about it anymore? If you are the type of person who actually enjoys my reviews, I can almost guarantee you are frantically Googling this in order to give them your money. For those of you that actually want to know whether or not the game is good beyond its ridiculously awesome premise, guess what? It totally is.

While the main campaign will only take two hours or so to beat on the normal difficulty, the real meat of Jamestown comes from the higher difficulty settings. It’s almost like Final Form Games’ couldn’t decide if they wanted to make a straight forward shoot-em-up or if they wanted to make a heavily Cave inspired bullet hell game, so they just made both. You may not notice many of the game’s bullet hell qualities on the lower settings, but by the time you ramp it up to Legendary, you are going to be in for some hell on mars. Bullet hell on mars. Which I guess is a lot more interesting than the Biker Mice from Mars they had to displace in order to push their colonial bullet-hell agenda.

Beyond the main campaign and its varied difficulty, you can unlock other game modes by spending points you’ve collected in Jamestown’s “Ye Olde Shoppe.” This expands the game quite a bit by offering you a gauntlet mode, in which you have only a handful of lives to defeat the entire game in a single sitting, or challenge packs that offer you increasingly difficult goal-oriented tasks such as gaining a high score in a small amount of time or surviving an onslaught of pumped up bad guys. The most interesting thing though is the games “Farce Mode.” This is an alternate telling of the story in an entirely tongue in cheek and self aware way. Sort of like if Chrono Trigger’s New Game+ spent most of its time making fun of Frog’s dialog.

Despite some rather more classically frustrating challenge modes, Jamestown never becomes impossible like many of its peers in the genre, but it isn’t an easy game by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not Touhou, but it’s not Color a Dinosaur either. Playing with a competent friend in the game’s co-op mode can help get you through the hairy parts, but only if you have a real life friend or two who are competent at shoot-em-ups. Finding help on the great wasteland of the internet is impossible as Jamestown doesn’t offer an online multiplayer option. You are limited to having to actually look at the person you are playing with. The amount that this detracts from the game really depends on how ugly your friends are.

What isn’t ugly is Jamestown’s aesthetic value. Hah, how was that for a segue? Final Form deserves some real attention for how nice this game looks and sounds. Whether it’s the fantastically drawn backgrounds, the vivid and colorful sprites, or the surprisingly great classical soundtrack, this is an aesthetic smorgasbord. If you are a huge fan of the 2D/16bit resurgence in game design, you won’t be disappointed in this at all.

Look, this is just a game you have to get. There are so many good things about it that even I, a master of the writing art, can’t think of ways to work some of them into this review. It’s ten bucks, it’s the first game released by an independent developer that you should be throwing your money at to support, it’s got aliens, and it’s just generally amazing. If you are one of those lanyard toting casuals we keep hearing so much about maybe you would be turned off by the games lack of online multiplayer or short campaign length on normal, but if you are a real human being and want to be challenged by a unique and beautiful game, go buy this right now.

Here’s The Rundown:

+ Pretty much everything.

+ Once again proving that Philadelphia is better than anywhere else.

- No online multiplayer, you have to look at and talk to real people in order to play co-op.

- It doesn’t get me drunk.

- Seriously, I can’t think of anything else. Why are you still reading this? Go buy the damned thing.

Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony was developed by and published by Final Form Games. It was released on June 8th, 2011 for the PC and is available through Steam, D2D, and Gamersgate for $9.99, although if they asked for my soul I probably would have paid that. It was played until completion (except for a few of those fucking challenges) on all difficulties which took about nine hours since, sometimes, I’m sort of bullet-helltarded and die a lot.

RipTen Review: Outland (XBLA)

Gavin Bard — Sat, 07 May 2011 13:19:33 +0000

Dear Video Game Industry,

My name is Gavin, and I’m a ~~jaded, apathetic 20-something who finds faults in pretty much everything and rebels against his middle-class comforts~~ wide eyed, optimistic 12 year old boy who is incredibly sympathetic and walks with an old wooden crutch. I’m writing you, oh great cabal of game designers, instead of Santa Claus or God, because I wanted to ask a favor.

Please make more games like Outland.

I don’t mean make games that are clones of Outland, because Outland itself is such a swirling vortex of influences that it would be nearly impossible to recreate without teams of scientists who hold advanced degrees in replicant making, I mean make more games that take advantage of the rise in downloadable “arcade” games to follow such an obviously strong creative drive. While there have been other great downloadable games that have been released over the last year that deserve a lot of credit for bringing the best elements of retro games back to the forefront, as well as helping to popularize the delivery method, Outland represents more than just an effective use of retro inspired gameplay- it is the best case scenario of what can happen when modern tech and aesthetics collide with retro ideas.

Outland, like the games that it has lashed together to make its Frankenstein’s monster of action/platforming/bullet-hell wonder, puts more emphasis on engaging gameplay than it does an engaging story. It uses flowery language to vaguely tell the tale of a great warrior who seeks to find a bipartisan solution to Chaos and Balance, played here by the eternal foes blue and red, in order to prevent the world’s destruction. Since this isn’t real life, bipartisanship actually works and creates one of the most fundamentally interesting and entertaining gameplay mechanics of recent history. Rapidly shifting your colors in order to solve puzzles, fight enemies, and solve puzzles while fighting enemies seems so simple, but ends up being deeper and more challenging than a lot of recent games that take up way more space than 500MBs.

Unlike Frankenstein’s monster though, this game is absolutely beautiful. Luckily, as a 12 year old boy with two old wooden crutches and mittens with holes in them tied to my jacket, I’m not a professional writer so I don’t have to think of words that do justice to just how effective the graphics of Outland are in adding to the game’s atmosphere. They give it such a strong identity and end up creating some stunningly gorgeous scenes. It’s a shame that you don’t have time to fully take a lot of it in since everything that is a different color than you is actively trying to kill you, which is probably pretty similar to how how Sally Kern views the world.

RipTen Review: Homefront (PC)

Gavin Bard — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:42:20 +0000

War. War never changes- but only because it doesn’t need to in order to sell 14 million units.

I pen this journal on scraps of paper in my ~~parent’s basement~~ reinforced bunker, far underground. The bombs from battles above shake dust loose from the floorboards and give the entire room a dull brown haze. The pallet is quite familiar to me, as I’ve seen it dozens of times over the last few years.

This is because we are at war.

No, I’m not talking about the war the wealthy in America have successfully waged against the other 80% of the country, or the war the current iteration of the Republican party has waged against minorities, women, free speech, common sense, and decency. I’m talking about the war fought between gamers who want more from the first person shooter genre and the majority who are perfectly fine with the status quo. For those who want more, it is an uphill struggle against the shortcomings of game journalism, the de facto 7 to 10 scoring system, and even the majority of consumers who have come into the hobby during its current boom.

It’s a bleak world, a scary one. One where everything is a clone of Call of Duty, even when it isn’t. Where common talking points permeate game reviews deeper than memes permeate certain alphabetical image boards (“I herd u lyke mentioning the phrase AAA Title as often as possible all of a sudden”) and where the same opinions seem to breed and spread across websites faster than the Quiverfull movement through the red states. A terrible, destroyed landscape where nothing is good enough unless its got the advertising budget for it, and where arbitrary and nonrepresentational scores assigned by websites-that-will-remain-nameless have the power to make kings and tank stocks. A war-torn world where we’ve come to accept that the content of a review doesn’t equal its numerical value, and that anything between 70 and 80 may as well be a zero. A world made in shades of brown and browner where mediocrity is rewarded by people with huge sales and critical acclaim all while those same people complain that nothing is challenging or original anymore.

I fear nothing can save us from this plight.

November 5, 2007

The first volley of this horrible war seemed so mild. That is how these things always start. Modern war is very rarely an instant thing, it is something that happens slowly. It’s ugliness creeping into the crevices of a culture like tentacles into an animated Japanese school girl, until one day you look up and realize everything has changed without you even noticing. The color has drained from the world, your friends and neighbors have fallen lockstep behind something you don’t agree with, and all because the ugliness around you has become the considered norm. If we only knew then what we know now…

February 25, 2008

I have begun to stock up on copies of Half-Life 2 in the event of a FPS apocalypse.

Many of my colleagues begin to fall sick, infected by the illness of the 7-10 system of scoring games. Bad games get 7s because the numbers below them have stopped existing, eliminated in an attempt to minimize damage to publisher relationships everywhere and save publications the wrath of overly opinionated internet denizens. Games that actually deserve it get 7s and people decide not to play them because they have become so conditioned to it being a bad score. The amount of enjoyment lost to gamers because of the inherent weakness of the numerical scoring system is almost enough to make me weep, if I wasn’t too tough and manly to cry.

Worse yet is how an interesting story has been relegated to afterthought status. Campaign has become nothing more than a hollow minigame for those times when the internet isn’t working right and you can’t connect to the servers. I begin to hope that some company somewhere would realize the error of these ways and learn from their mistakes. It is my hope that someday, maybe a little over three years after their last game, a company would realize that story substance is even more important than graphical style and create something that is truly remarkable. Something that develops intelligently and emotionally, all while still offering strong gameplay. If this hypothetical company could create a hypothetical game that does that, I probably wouldn’t even care if it was only around six or seven hours long either. Hypothetically, of course, since I am writing this entry in 2008 and have no knowledge of the future.

RipTen Review: Hard Corps Uprising (XBLA)

Gavin Bard — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:45:05 +0000

I’d like you to take a second out of your busy day to think about something- when was the last time you were truly challenged by a video game. I mean truly and completely challenged by a game on it’s default setting, to the point where you were so frustrated you were ready to smash your controller into a few dozen shards of shapeless plastic? I’m sure you’ve been pissed when somebody just won’t stop camping in Bad Company 2, or when you decided to crank the difficulty of God of War up as far as it could go and found out that just being looked at by an enemy was enough to make you have to reload a save, but when was the last time you put a game into your system of choice and were brutally assaulted by the developers intentions on it’s default setting?

It’s probably been a while.

Difficulty has become a characteristic of an era we no longer live in. When a game has above normal difficulty, people generally refer to it as ‘old school’ or ‘classic.’ That is, if they don’t outwardly dismiss it for being ‘unbalanced’ or having ‘too steep of a learning curve.’ Now, if I were a progressive leftist with anarchist leanings, I’m sure I could extrapolate this as a representation of what our culture has become. I would say something like, in the everybody-is-a-winner mentality that has begun to wrap it’s soggy tendrils around our world, a world where majestic and misunderstood beasts like the Dickwolves are persecuted, we seem to have lost focus on how rewarding it is to accomplish nearly impossible things. Luckily I’m not, so I won’t say anything like that.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s probably been a while since you felt the same kind of consistent challenge that you felt from 90% of the games you played when most of your wardrobe consisted of matching GI Joe pajamas.

Enter “Hard Corps: Uprising.” This game isn’t just hard, it’s a total fucking asshole. Oh, and feel free to use that as a blurb in your marketing campaign Konami. Hard Corps starts at a difficulty setting somewhere around “screw you” and ends somewhere around “razordicks.” It is not for the weak of willed, as whatever ability you think you have with video games will be ripped apart and shown to you as it bleeds to death, all while it laughs at you and continues to shoot impossible to dodge lasers from mechanical desert snake monsters. You can’t necessarily accuse Hard Corps of being cheap, but it certainly does take a sadistic joy in throwing so many things at you that your death is all but guaranteed.

Note, however, that I say that as an entirely positive thing. Hard Corps: Uprising is the prequel to Contra: Hard Corps on the Sega Genesis, so what would you expect other than unrelenting sprite murder? Arc System Works was tasked with giving the Contra series a modern shine and has done an amazing job of capturing what made that series so enduring- it’s balls to the wall challenge.

This isn’t to say that they were content with just making an outrageously hard game, they decided to make it outrageously entertaining as well. The gameplay is exactly what you expect from a Contra game- you run around slaughtering your foes, collecting powerups, and trying not to die. You can do this in two different modes, “Rising” and “Arcade.” In the new to the series Rising Mode, you go through the eight stages gaining credits that can be used to purchase permanent character upgrades that make things slightly easier on you. Only slightly though, as even a maxed out character doesn’t make Hard Corps: Uprising a walk in the park.

Arcade Mode is for people so masochistic that I feel obligated to give them a number to a good dominatrix. In Arcade, you start off with preset powers and abilities. Without upgrades, there are parts of this game that are so face smashingly hard that you’ll have ‘Nam flashbacks to that weekend you tried to beat Ghosts N Goblins. The one that nearly got you committed, that one.

Arc System Works didn’t pull any punches with the games inherent difficulty, but the addition of the RPG like Rising Mode was pretty brilliant, and was a much better idea than putting in some sort of easy mode or varying levels of difficulty. It gives people a chance to see things to the end, an improbable task without being able to bestow yourself with some extra lives.

They also didn’t hold back with the aesthetics. One of the reasons I’ve always loved Arc System Works so much is their fantastic grasp on making anime-styled games. They don’t just get the graphics and music right, which they do entirely in Hard Corps: Uprising, but they get the over-the-top atmosphere, plot, and character development right as well. Hard Corps features beautiful backgrounds, colorful characters, and even a cool story that I’m sure Arc System Work’s and Konami are looking forward to developing further at this series continues.

That isn’t to say that Hard Corps: Uprising doesn’t have a few negatives, although those negatives have nothing to do with the core game itself. Playing through the game with a partner makes things twice as fun, and the co-op is probably going to be what will really give it staying power, but the lack of a matchmaking service hurts things. As it is, you can only invite friends and party members to join in with your constant failures. More robust options for playing online would be quite welcome.

More frustrating than every boss battle combined though is the DLC. Hard Corps: Uprising starts you off with two characters who are basically the same, which makes sense considering the co-op focus, but in the (super awesome) intro and the character bio screen, they show you two more characters. Where are they you ask? Why, they are Day 1 DLC of course. There is literally nothing in this world that drives me more crazy than Day 1 DLC, and I won’t be proselytizing on my beliefs on it here (Spoiler Alert: I think it’s the worst thing to happen to gaming since developers decided the only color palettes you can make a FPS in is brown and browner) but to feature both these characters so heavily and make them so clearly integral to the plot, then hold them hostage, is a pretty big kick in the jimmy.

Still, capitalism in all it’s disgusting glory aside, this is a must have for anybody who misses waking up on a Saturday morning, pouring themselves a big bowl of Nintendo Cereal System, and having their childhood devoured by unrelentingly difficult games. Even with the new art direction for the series, Hard Corps: Uprising just feels like a Contra game through and through.

What are you doing still reading this? Go download this and yell curse words at your television until your neighbor calls the fuzz. Aren’t you ‘hard corps’ enough?

Ugh. Did I really just type that?

Here’s the Rundown:

+ Beating each level feels like a real accomplishment.
+ Ark System Work’s anime update of the series is fantastic.
+ It’s a new Contra game.

- I’d vote Republican if it meant companies started including day 1 DLC in the game.
- A more robust system for putting together co-op games would be nice.
- It might drive you to the point of insanity.

Hard Corps: Uprising was developed by Arc System Works, a company I would totally bang if it was one singular human being, and published by Konami. It was released on February 16th, 2011 on the Xbox Live Arcade for 1200MSP or $15 in real money. Or as real as our money actually is considering that all money is inherently valueless and is only given value by our plutocratic overlords and their manipulations to keep us subservient to their materialistic desires. What was I talking about? Oh, that’s right, it will also be released on the PlayStation Network at some point. The game was played to completion in Uprising mode on the difficulty setting of razordick, and took about nine hours with about three hours put into co-op. I haven’t beaten it on Arcade yet since I don’t get off on self flagellation. RipTen’s copy of the game was provided to us by either Konami or Arc System Works, Dave isn’t answering his e-mail yet to tell me which because he is too busy flexing and making sure his muscles glisten in the afternoon sun.

Ripten Review: Alien Breed 3: Descent (XBLA, PC)

Gavin Bard — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 23:45:05 +0000

I’ve always really enjoyed Team17′s Alien Breed series, and not just because I’m a pretentious hipster who views anything more than ten years old through nostalgia tinged sunglasses. “Everything was so much better back then,” ancient early 20-somethings like me say about anytime that isn’t right now. The original Amiga Alien Breed games, however, are actually good for reasons outside of nostalgic worship. After reviewing the second entry in Team17′s reboot of the series, I went back and played the previous games from the un-rebooted (is that an actual phrase?) past and, surprise surprise, they still mostly held up as great, and entirely difficult, games.

The reborn Alien Breed trilogy has been good, but not great so far. As each episode has come out though, they have improved, and Alien Breed: Descent might be the best Alien Breed game since Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues. The core gameplay of Descent may not be drastically different from Impact or Assault, but that is fine since the solid game mechanics weren’t ever the problem. The rest of the game has been refined just enough to make this an easy recommendation.

My only real complaints of the previous two was a feeling of repetition would sneak in after a few levels. It was tapered by this being an episodic series, if either of the first two installments were full length titles I’m sure the repetitiveness would have lead to much lower scores from me, so even after the game fell into a routine it didn’t entirely make you not want to play. The reason for this repetition was that the environments and enemies just started to blend together- there wasn’t a lot of variation to be seem during Conrad’s heroic travels through the hallways and corridors of either the Leopold or the Alien infested AI controlled ship-of-death it has accidentally pulled an Evelyn Evelyn with. The positively retro run-and-gun feel also didn’t vary itself too much during the previous titles, and while that was perfectly fine in 1992, it did wear thin in 2010 no matter how hard I tried to not let it.

Alien Breed 3: Descent remedies both these issues by introducing perspective-shifting set pieces and giving the ship way more of a personality than it has at any point in previous episodes. While Impact and Assault were both well above average games, they only slightly felt like Alien Breed games. The trademark difficulty has always been present, and Descent is no exception- it is more difficult than a casual gamer may like, but neither of the other games in the trilogy really captured the atmosphere that Team17 was so good at creating in the Amiga Alien Breeds. I thought it was quite interesting that nearly 20 years in between old and new, yet the oldest ones were the most atmospheric and varied.

Luckily, the bowels of the decaying alien ship in Descent are a way more interesting setting than this reboot has seen so far. Thanks to it coming in a little too hot on its descent (oh, now I get it) to the planet it was orbiting, you get to see way more than just metal hallways and biological corridors. When you combined these new locations with the games already smooth aesthetics, it really does feel like enough to push this into a different tier. I would even hazard a guess that this is the most technologically superior of the new trilogy as well- the graphics seem crisper, the ship more fraught with very well designed dangers like flames and flooding, and best of all, I didn’t notice any controller-smashing bugs this time around.

No weird glitches leading to unnecessary restarts does a lot to alleviate the frustration and repetitiveness that held back the earlier episodes. Alien Breed still has a questionable save system with auto saves in some less than helpful places, and not having to restart because you got stuck in a wall right after beating a difficult alien attack really helps the pacing of the game.

As mentioned earlier, this isn’t an easy game. On it’s normal setting, you are definitely going to be challenged. You will find yourself taking a lot of chances on low health in order to conserve health packs, and money doesn’t feel as plentiful as it had been previously. This makes your budgetary decisions way more important- do you focus on staying well stocked on ammo and health? Or do you save up and buy the upgrades that might stretch your dwindling resources further? The relative rarity of money and gear make things way more tense, and way more interesting.

Not everything is improved though. While the atmosphere is more in-line with Team17′s original Alien Breed, the objectives aren’t quite as varied. Most of them involve a lot of backtracking and mostly revolve around activating power to doors and computers you need to continue. It’s broken up by well planned enemy attacks, but Conrad seems to spend a buttload of his time holding buttons down. It also gets frustrating how often you go out of your way to check a body or locker and get the “nothing of interest was found” message, especially when it leads to you losing precious health and getting no reward. I get the feeling that was a conscious decision in order to make exploration more dangerous, but it is slightly rage inducing after the 20^th time.

The controls are still the same and still slightly awkward at first as well. I’ve played the other episodes, but it took me a little while to get used to the manual control of the cameras. Again. Having to cycle through your items manually using the D-pad can get you into trouble as well. This is mostly because health kits and grenades both operate in the same slot, which means it takes a clicks to get from your frags to your health, and this is a game where a few seconds can turn you into a big bucket of Puddi. Although after a level or so, controlling the camera separate from your aiming doesn’t feel as strange, and you get more adept at flicking through your support inventory, so it isn’t bad enough to take anything away from what a great game Alien Breed: Descent has turned out to be.

Beyond the single-player story, Alien Breed offers the same co-op modes it has throughout the episodes. Three levels for you to play through with a friend online through Steam or Xbox Live that are separate from Conrad’s story in single-player, and three maps for Descent’s survival mode which, as I’m sure you can imagine, involves surviving as long as you can against near endless alien onslaughts with limited items. Co-op is always fun, but Descent doesn’t do anything to differentiate its multiplayer options from previous installments. If you played co-op to death in either of the other Alien Breed installments, you know exactly what to expect from this one.

When you add it all up, Team17 finished it’s new Alien Breed trilogy on a very high note. One interesting thing to think about is if moving to an episodic format was the best thing for the series. On one hand, when you look at these as three separate games, the improvement of Descent over its predecessors makes it way easier to recommend somebody purchase just this one part. On the other hand, when you take all three games as one title, you realize that they were all paced very well for one game. Impact starts of slow and introduces you to the games mechanics, Assault picks up the pace and gives you more of the story, and Descent brings it all to a frantic conclusion. If taken as one game, the problems of Impact and Assault don’t seem as drastic because they seem so unimportant or are eliminated the closer you get to the finale. It’s as much a catch 22 as John Joseph Yossarian.

In my professionally unprofessional opinion, if you haven’t gotten into the Alien Breed series yet, you may as well pick up all three episodes. They won’t break your bank account and the story deserves to be played all the way through as one game like I suspect it may have been intended. If you are light on funds or just want to try things out before you commit to the whole shebang, Descent is definitely the high water mark. Pulling an Irréversible and beginning at the end will be your best bet. Except you’ll have to shoot a bunch of aliens instead of having to watch Monica Bellucci get violated for fourteen minutes.

PS: If you don’t get that last reference, I fully suggest you go rent Irréversible. Watch it with your parents and/or grandparents. Trust me, they will love it!

Here’s The Rundown:

+ Improvement over previous two episodic installments in almost every way.
+ Unreal engine shines.
+ Practically drips atmosphere and is more in line with the feel of the original Alien Breed series.
- The difficulty doesn’t do casual fans or people not used to the series any favors.
- Co-op hasn’t been changed at all.
- Camera angle and controls can still be frustrating.

Alien Breed 3: Descent was developed and published by Team17 for the PC and Xbox Live Arcade. The game was released in the United States for digital download on November 7th, 2010 with a retail price of $9.99. The copy used for this review was for the Xbox Live version, and was provided to Ripten by Team17, who I hope make a new Superfrog game next. A Steam version was also played, mostly for the multiplayer because I prefer the refined art of keyboard + mouse as compared to mashing my fingers on a controller like a heathenish caveman. The single-player campaign was played to completion in roughly 6 hours, while the multiplayer was played for 3 hours or so. Specs of the PC used for the Steam version are as follows: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 @ 2.83ghz, Dual Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX GPU’s, 8GB RAM, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. Specs of the Xbox 360 used are exactly the same as yours, except I have a Rolo Tomassi sticker.